Sunday, February 13, 2011

why he's not in college and I am


My 24 yr old son saw me working on an essay for poetry class this morning. That’s not hard, he said. All you need to do is bullshit.

Sunday, February 06, 2011

white devil


Reading Amiri Baraka for my poetry class. A poem written after the murder of Malcolm X: Poem for Black Hearts.

For all of him, and all of yourself, look up,
black man, quit stuttering and shuffling, look up
black man

I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was a high school student in Beardstown, Illinois. I was at the county fair a while later with my friend Sue Hye. A couple black guys from Chicago were flirting with us. I asked mine what he thought he was doing. Didn’t he know that I was the white devil? He looked at me confusedly and then turned to his friend, “Yo! Raymond, come hear this white girl talk.”